The word was first recorded in English in 1561, from Latin. Thomas Paynell, in a work titled Ensamples of Virtue and Vice, used it to describe the Apostle John's move to the Isle of Patmos.
Latin gave English the word directly, without passing through French. It was built from a prefix meaning 'back', joined to a verb meaning 'to send as a deputy, or to charge with a commission'.
That Latin verb, 'to send as a deputy', is possibly related to a Latin noun meaning 'a law, or a rule'. Both may trace to a Proto-Indo-European root, *leg-, meaning 'to gather, or collect', a root that gave Greek its word for an olive gatherer.
LECTURE and ELECT share the same root, meaning 'to gather, or collect'. LECTURE entered English around 1300, from Latin, originally meaning 'to pick out words', which may be the true origin of its modern sense, 'to read'. ELECT entered English in the early fifteenth century, from Latin, meaning 'to choose, or pick out'.
By the mid-eighteenth century the word's meaning had broadened beyond literal banishment, describing anyone or anything consigned to an unimportant, or obscure, position. It was also used to describe assigning a subject or a creature to a particular class or category, as when nineteenth-century zoologists debated whether to place sea sponges among plants or animals. In 1899 the word had taken on a new sense, still feared by football supporters across Europe today.
